‘No thanks!’ to EU and Nato, Iceland PM says

Eurozone failures mean Iceland should stay out of the EU, its prime minister told EUobserver.

She would also quit Nato if she had her say.

“I don’t think we should enter the EU right now. I don’t think there’s any reason to apply,” Katrin Jakobsdottir said in an interview with this website, as Iceland’s new government prepared to celebrate its first anniversary in power.

“Personally, I’m critical towards the economic policies of the EU – the creation of the eurozone without any real centralised policies on taxes or fiscal policies,” she said.

“The European Central Bank has become really powerful without being very democratic. The economic policies of the EU have been really distant from people in the eurozone and they’ve created divisions that needn’t be there,” she added.

Iceland applied to join the EU in 2009, but abandoned the process in 2015.

The issue of EU membership remained divisive, Jakobsdottir said.

“It was controversial then [in 2009] and still is,” she said after recent polls, which indicated that 60 percent of Icelanders wanted to stay out of Europe, while 40 percent wanted to go in.

Free trade with the EU had been unequivocally good for Iceland, the prime minister said, however.

“Iceland’s position within the EEA has proved beneficial to us,” Jakobsdottir said.

“When we look at our economy, our social structure and our policy-making, I think we’ve done pretty well without being members of the EU,” she said.

“You can check all the indices of the world: We’re not doing too badly on economic performance, social indicators, or gender equality for that matter, where we’re ahead of all other Nordic countries,” she added